eBay users on both sides of the Atlantic are reporting potentially serious site glitches that have confounded customer service representatives trying to diagnose and fix the problems. The glitches, while unrelated, both appeared to involve database problems that prevented users of the online auction house from carrying out basic …

Death by deletion

They should go to backup...

Every major data center in the world has backup records and so should eBay. I work for a major hospital system and we have backup records that go back a year. eBay should be able to find the missing records and restore them. If they don't have backup records, shame on them and they are flirting with disaster.

No Accountability

you hit it right on the nose! Following the familiar pattern of many large modern company's, eBay is succeeding in driving away their customer base and making it extremely difficult to do business on their venue. Senior management is killing the organization and the livelihoods of many well meaning businesses. Meg Whitman has got to go while eBay can still be saved!

So Whats new????

Ebay has been suffering from all these problems for years.

I'v had stuff sent to me for no reason (although on contacting the seller they have confirmed that I was the winning bidder and had paid by paypal) even when my ebay and paypal accounts showed nothing. I'v had an account disapear (ID Theft, which Ebay couldn't do anything about as the thief changed all my contact details and EBay refused to deal with me as I couldn;t answer any security questions correctly) EBay sucks, come on Google, at least with you I could see the sellers house before I bid, If it's some scroat from Wythenshaw I'll know not to bother.

It's a pity...

...that companies are not required by law to have adequate backup and recovery systems in place if they want to pass their annual audit.

And what sort of helpdesk monkey can't understand that if you're claiming your account has been hijacked, you won't be able to answer any security questions? Why don't they have the intelligence to speak to their counterparts at PayPal to get problems sorted out?

Ulp!

Fuck ebay

They have no accountability, complete deniability, utter irresponsibility, and they're assholes to boot. They provide a useful service, yes, but the way they go about doing it makes them less trustworthy than a hungry fox in a hen house.

Until they implement some form of policy that sees them accept responsibility for their fuck-ups, I'll be staying well clear of them.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall

Coming on the heels of an unhappy experience with Amazon, this report makes me think that these big online monopolies inevitably lose contact with their customer base and fail to remember that if they don't solve their customers' problems, they're toast. I don't mean malfunction type problems but problems like "do they have that book I want?", "what it will cost to ship it?", "what kinds of payment are accepted?", and similarly mundane but essential issues.

Amazon appears to me to be working so hard to force recommendations down one's throat that the basic functions of their system have been seriously degraded. They don't seem to realize that there are alternatives and if you put too many speedbumps on the information highway (to use some archaic language), customers will turn to those alternatives: they're only a click or two away.

Ebay is shooting themselves in the foot in other ways, but the spirit of the exercise is the same: damn the customers and full speed ahead.

2 winner glitch

Yeah - I had a fun glitch recently. I listed one item, and ebay let two people buy it using buy-it-now. So I had a payment from each of them, each of whom thought they'd won.

I had to spend my own money refunding the difference, & ebay has been USELESS in helping me. They say they're not responsible for "interruptions of service" & refuse to budge. Ebay? Ebastards more like...

My (lack of) Space

Similar thing happened to me with my MySpace account. I woke up one morning to find that there was no sign of my account and all the help desk had to say was -

"MySpace will not restore deleted accounts. If you deleted your own account, please create a new account and note that if you wish to remove it, the deletion is permanent.

If your account was deleted by MySpace, please review our Terms of Service in order to better understand our community rules. If you wish to create another account on MySpace, please heed these rules in order to avoid future deletion."

No matter how many times I asked the question 'Why was the account deleted?' this was the only answer they were willing to give so now I have a Facebook account :-)

Backups of databases

You are all right, they not only should have a backup of their systems, they are legally required to under the data protection act, as they have a duty of care of your data. The problem is that if they are using a cheapass backup system and a chepass database (I don't know what they are using, but it's not hard to belive is it?) they may not be able to recover individual records or tables, this would leave them in the situation where they can't recover an individual user, but they can recover everything in one go. I've seen this method quite a lot with companies who want to save a quid or two. They all eventually end up trying to work out how they are going to recover individual bits of the database...

Deleted

Deleting things seems to be eBaY's new way of solving problems. Probably another of their automated scripts gone wild. I have had several auctions deleted only hours from completion due to words or phrases which breach one or other of their policies but where fine for the prior 7 days. eg. "please contact me for more info" - the "safety" team suggested I was trying to avoid paying fees by trading outside of ebay. On contacting customer "no"services, I was told the auction had been removed and there was nothing they could do, well other than relisting and waiting another 7 days (to have it deleted for another inane reason)

I have been told the scripts just have key words to look for and take no account for context...

Role one someone else creating a competitor to Fleabay, they are just getting to big and greedy for everyones good.

refusenik

No doubt about it, ebay and amazon don't care about anything as long as they get their cut. I didn't want accounts with either of them (or paypal) but in this crap country what alternative is there for getting anything different to what's available in the high street. Any high street - they're all the same. Don't trust google either.

ebay and Paypal scum

Ebay and Paypal exist to serve ebay and Paypal. Purely for profit, and no customer service whatsoever. I have had numerous problems in the past with people buying goods, paying for them on credit card, receiving the goods and leaving feedback saying they were pleased, and then telling their credit card company that the goods didn't arrive. The credit card company then claimed the money back from Paypal, who claimed it back from me, even though feedback had been left, and tracking numbers had been supplied for parcels. This meant I lost the goods and the payment. Bitter and Twisted ? Yes, I am. Customer service meant nothing to ebay or Paypal, and they exist purely to make money in whatever way possible. I was still charged for the listing fees, so they still took their cut. It doesn't surprise me that they have lost these accounts, and have no way to retrieve them, and in fact have no idea where they have gone. I hardly ever use ebay anymore, and wouldn't give them the time of day. In fact, they'd probably lose that then charge me for the fact that they'd lost it.

Customer service

seems to be a globally dying art. Service reps are only interested in getting rid of the query as quickly as possible, knowing that, when the increasingly angry and frustrated customer calls back, they will be routed to someone else.

"Consistency of service"

LESLIE, GOOGLE AUCTIONS HELL NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Are you mad??? Google are hell bent on keeping all your data, tracking everything you do and having enough data to say who you are where you live what your email address is and what websites you visit and then store it all , waiting for some hacker to come along and find out alllllll your dirty secrets.

They couldn't care less

"Hi, We're eBay and we are the hegemonic provider of auction services. Yes, we don't give a shit but frankly we're so big we don't have to. Where are you worms going to go? QXL? Don't make me fucking laugh. Just shut up and keep paying your money, there's a good soldier."

That's the really existing marketing place not that made-up-invented-place that only exists in economics books that says economic-Darwinism will eliminate all the shit companies. This is monopoly capitalism.

delays...

@ the 'Fuck eBay'ers...

You're absolutely right of course - the experience and service is completely shoddy. I've had several run ins with eBay before, who palm you off to PayPal - and then PayPal send you back to eBay, it's ridiculous.

The problem is they can get away with it because they know that no other service on the web comes close to what they do. eBay knows they have no competition on the web, and for the foreseeable future, this will be true.

It's a shame - but they're starting to not give a crap, because of this fact. Poor show.

My eBay problems

I stopped using eBay after I complained about sellers expecting me to provide feedback before they would. I complained and got no response. Effectively it means that if I pay and don't get an item, then leave negative feedback, they just leave tit for tat negative feedback for me.

ebay 2 big 4 its own good

The ebay 48hr paypal update fob off is just that, I have a customer payment showing in paypal that 11 days later is still not in ebay and the ebay customer order details have vanished so I don't know who to send the item to!

I have had my ebay account restricted for selling too much of the same thing - we are a computer software stockist and reseller, they've never heard of clearing excess stock so we must be fraudsters making multiple copies. So they restrict our selling, no questions asked, automated replies whenyou query it, no appeal.

Ebay and PayPal have some of the worst instransigent uninformed customer service around.

The best part about eBay is...

...their racket on arbitration.

Used to be you could simply get eBay customer service to arbitrate in a case of fraud or false feedback. Now, you have to pay for arbitration just to have the case heard, even in instances where it is bleedin' obvious that the seller/buyer has committed fraud.

The best example I have of this is when I worked in a music shop. We shipped a keyboard synth to a guy. He claimed it didn't work. He used the e-mails from the keyboard company's engineer to back up his claim. When cc'ing the engineer in a response, the engineer came back as saying "I never said this; Dude, if you want to quote me in the future, quote what I say, not what you wanted to hear."

Obviously a situation in which eBay could reverse the negative feedback but chose to instead try and make money off the process.

Fuck eBay. Everything good is beginning to show up on a host of other websites. Sure, you've got to visit a lot more, but it's worth it not to deal with eBay until another big auction house crops up.

Dodgy Platform

Reading about deleted accounts prompted me to log in just to check that my account still exists. Fortunately it does, and has done for more years than I remember.

While I was there, I checked the URL to see what platform the site runs on:

"http://my.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll"

...A ".dll" extension on a "document" can mean only one thing - the whole damned site is built in .net and runs on the most insecure and unstable platform imaginable (Windows). It also means that its back end database is almost certainly the goddamned awful piece of software known as MS SQL Server.

I'm not intending to start (yet another) Windows-'Nix flame war - we're talking server-side platforms here, specifically internet facing platforms. Given the volume of readily available hacks for flaws in Microsoft web server technology, people still seriously trust this company with their money online?

By the way, what ever happened to the online auction site which was taking off around the time that eBay started up? Was a 3-letter name starting with 'Q' if I remember correctly. Everyone was using it in the day, but somehow everyone seemed to end up using eBay instead...

@Martin H Watson

I agree completely. Sellers should be made to leave feedback about how reliable/trustworthy a buyer you are (i.e. did you pay, that's the whole point about allowing sellers to leave feedback?) before they receive feedback from the buyer. It's a shit system and as a buyer you effectively become a feedback hostage every time.

It's a broken system and the quality of the data in the feedback scores is low/untrustworthy because of this.

@Anonymous Coward - Dodgy Platform

FYI - eBayISAPI.dll is an ISAPI dll written in C++ and is used to handle front end requests.

Properly patched, secured and maintained windows boxes are no less secure than unix boxes. I work for a shared hosting company, we've not had a single break in (i.e. machine hijack) on any of our windows boxes, it's usually customer ftp accounts that get broken because the customer used a daft password but all the attacker can do is hijack the site. We've had more exploits on the Unix platform due to PHP and sloppy security practices by arrogant unix fanboys like yourself who think they know it all, but clearly don't. As far as stability is concerned, we host on average 1200 sites per windows box running ASP, ASP.NET (both versions) and Perl. These boxes are rock solid and any trouble we get is usually because of a customer abusing resources which we monitor for and nail quite quickly.

Re: Dodgy Platform

As I understand it most of the eBay auction application is written in Java with the search written in C++; databases are all Oracle and the indexing is done on Sun kit. In fact as far as I'm aware most key eBay systems are run on Sun kit which Sun is proud to boast about: http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/ebay.xml. This really has nothing to do with Microsoft, despite this rather hopeless attempt at flame-bait, does anyone really still talk in drivel like"specifically internet facing platforms"?

Many of the biggest accounting and billing fuck ups were all done on systems that had nothing to do with Microsoft, just look at the nightmares people have with banks, utilities, phones, credit cards, etc.

The site you're talking about is QXL that I recall found a niche in the market as it would let people trade all the undesirable things eBay wouldn't allow like porn, sex toys and the like. No one really used QXL because it was crap and unreliable, ironically subverting the useless diatribe about Microsoft above as QXL actually was, and is, run on an MS platform.

Deja Vu

The stories match exactly the problems I have had with Ebay, and why I don't use PayPal any more, or Ebay at all if I can avoid it.

Paying for "Won" auctions that 24 hours later say I didn't win, paying with a credit card on one account and having the money taken from a totally different account and incurring £75 in bank charges with no refund or apology, locked out of THREE accounts in four years.

Can I have a quick swipe at Amazon while I am here "Free delivery on Orders over £16.99" ?? Like FCUK !! £21 order incurred £22 in postage because "We had it shipped directly to you from three different suppliers."

Let's get some legal framework in place

I suggest that everyone with horror stories about eBay & Paypal start to write letters to their local MP in the UK demanding legislation to protect customers and force them to keep full backups. I'd also push for regulation similar to the FSA for these kinds of entities when operating in the UK, no matter which country they are based in.

@Windows Fanboy & Anon Coward

"Properly patched, secured and maintained windows boxes are no less secure than unix boxes"

Utter bollocks.

Windows webservers are usually running IIS, which when I last looked, runs at least partly in kernel-mode. As a result, when cracked the hacker gets full control of the machine. Do some research on the defacing scoreboard sites and see who they are hitting.

Well done for leaping to stupid conclusions like "another uninformed Nix fanboy with clearly no actual experience of running a large scale hosting operation on Windows (or Unix probably)" ... because in fact my previous job was supporting a farm of windows and redhat servers at a big London web design house.

Are you quite done with the "arrogant" and "fanboy" remarks? I think you've done a good job of making yourself sound like a simple-minded windows admin in the process - blaming PHP security flaws on Unix is pretty fucking dumb, since it runs on top of most webservers regardless of platform.

If you're going to label people - get it right: I'm an OpenBSD "fanboy" if anything.

@Anon Coward - yes people DO still use "drivel" like "internet facing platforms" because a lot of companies out there DO still put windows boxes on the 'net with no firewall, and a suprising proportion of those who do bother with firewalls don't seem to know to put 'DENY ALL' as the first rule.

The point I obviously failed to make is that eBay has had big security problems for the last few years, with apparently someone inside their systems running admin level hacks at will. If the site is using URLs containing ".dll" then its almost certainly running a MS webserver ... a quick check suggests that guess was right:

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.ebay.co.uk

Clearly someone out there likes Microsoft though, as they're catching up in the webserver market:

what? no backup?

the mind boggles.

tho I understand it's tough to restore an entry or two, but if it's a known issue of a number of deleted accounts, it shouldn't take that long to restore them. Dedicate some newer staffer to get em' redone, maybe even a couple of days-slow but at least the info would get restored.

This is why I use eBay and PayPal as it was meant to be used-not like a bank, and not as a means of support. No money stays in PP accounts, which is linked to a small checking account that has just enough to cover transactions. Nor would I rely on something like eBay to host a livelyhood.

Hell, it's these "businesses" that have practically ruined eBay. Thousands of listings of the same product at the same price-usually higher than a dedicated merchant sells 'em for,drop-shippers who are just middlemen who clog up the works.

Maybe enough bad hype will clear off the dodgy businesses and the get-rich-quick daytraders and make eBay the online garage sale it used to be.

seems like stefan's undeleted

Restricted Sales

Adding my tuppence - my sister's ebay account was restricted due to the nature of her product and their inability to differentiate - she is a creator of educational resource media which is supplied on disc. Ebay decided that it was impossible for her to own the copyright to all of the items she sells and suspended her account.

A competitor of some sort would certainly be welcome, especially in the UK. But I think that we are in the minority thinking this - I have not really touched ebay for years and started to warn people against it. They didn't want to hear though, and nor should they. For the unconnected general public, ebay is one of the 'internet' things that they've just discovered and they are in the first flush of romance with it, like with all these other damn things.

I think that the majority of people will soon be ready to move their internet experience forward in whatever ways. It's obvious that people will discover at some point that it is much easier to code your own basic webpage than to set up a myspace page. Perhaps the ISP's (and maybe I'm talking to BT really, since they make it absolutely as difficult as possible to administer their internet accounts) will start to provide a more useful introduction to the internet, and attempt to make basic page creation and upload easier. Then maybe we can see more truly quality networking sites (among which i count ebay) which are of use to communities. Perhaps sales should take place on separate sites for different types of items. The task of replacing ebay could be split up and advertised in the specialised areas. More like Abebooks, I suppose even though they are no model of good business. At least they let you advertise your actual real world existence though. Selling stuff via forums or the like may allow you to get a real idea of the seller.

Feedback is useless

Slightly off-topic, but the feedback system on eBay could be improved so easily. At present, no one will leave negative or even neutral feedback for fear of retalition.

The way to solve this is have a period of, say, 10 days where neither party can see the feeback left for the other. After these 10 days you lose the right to leave feedback and any feedback left is made public.

That way, people would say what they think and not just AAAAA++++++++ when the item fails to arrive...

@ Sean Healey

OEZ NOEZ MY RATINGZ!

Sorry, but the EBay rating system was broken for so damned long that I rarely take a sellers rating into consideration.

Giving someone "positive" rating of "A+++ ZOMG GREAT SERVICE" for following the terms of the agreement, and the item being in the conditions described is like giving a 30% tip for a waitress that services you well enough that you have no complaints, but not so good that you were impressed.

My wife tried to give someone a Neutral rating for something she bought in "Like new" condition that was definitely "Used". She stated she was still satisfied with the product, but that it was definitely not "like new". She got flamed by the seller, and ended up not using ebay for over a year.

Now people cannot see their feedback until they GIVE feedback. That's the right way to do it, but people still need to give appropriate feedback.